ALBERT

Description: No abstract available. doi:10.2204/iodp.sd.13.09.2011

Description: Bedload sediment transport and erosion processes in channels are important components of water induced natural hazards in alpine environments. A raster based distributed hydrological model, TOPKAPI, has been further developed to support continuous simulations of river bed erosion and deposition processes. The hydrological model simulates all relevant components of the water cycle and non-linear reservoir methods are applied for water fluxes in the soil, on the ground surface and in the channel. The sediment transport simulations are performed on a sub-grid level, which allows for a better discretization of the channel geometry, whereas water fluxes are calculated on the grid level in order to be CPU efficient. Several transport equations as well as the effects of an armour layer on the transport threshold discharge are considered. Flow resistance due to macro roughness is also considered. The advantage of this approach is the integrated simulation of the entire basin runoff response combined with hillslope-channel coupled erosion and transport simulation. The comparison with the modelling tool SETRAC demonstrates the reliability of the modelling concept. The devised technique is very fast and of comparable accuracy to the more specialised sediment transport model SETRAC.

Description: There is growing concern that flooding is becoming more frequent and severe in Europe. A better understanding of flood regime changes and their drivers is therefore needed. The paper reviews the current knowledge on flood regime changes in European rivers that has traditionally been obtained through two alternative research approaches. The first approach is the data-based detection of changes in observed flood events. Current methods are reviewed together with their challenges and opportunities. For example, observation biases, the merging of different data sources and accounting for nonlinear drivers and responses. The second approach consists of modelled scenarios of future floods. Challenges and opportunities associated with flood change scenarios are discussed such as fully accounting for uncertainties in the modelling cascade and feedbacks. To make progress in flood change research, we suggest that a synthesis of these two approaches is needed. This can be achieved by focusing on long duration records and flood-rich and flood-poor periods rather than on short duration flood trends only, by formally attributing causes of observed flood changes, by validating scenarios against observed flood regime dynamics, and by developing low-dimensional models of flood changes and feedbacks. The paper finishes with a call for a joint European flood change research network.

Description: Extreme precipitation is thought to increase with warming at rates similar to or greater than the water vapour holding capacity of the air at ~ 7% °C−1, the so-called Clausius–Clapeyron (CC) rate. We present an empirical study of the variability in the rates of increase in precipitation intensity with air temperature using 30 years of 10 min and 1 h data from 59 stations in Switzerland. The analysis is conducted on storm events rather than fixed interval data, and divided into storm type subsets based on the presence of lightning which is expected to indicate convection. The average rates of increase in extremes (95th percentile) of mean event intensity computed from 10 min data are 6.5% °C−1 (no-lightning events), 8.9% °C−1 (lightning events) and 10.7% °C−1 (all events combined). For peak 10 min intensities during an event the rates are 6.9% °C−1 (no-lightning events), 9.3% °C−1 (lightning events) and 13.0% °C−1 (all events combined). Mixing of the two storm types exaggerates the relations to air temperature. Doubled CC rates reported by other studies are an exception in our data set, even in convective rain. The large spatial variability in scaling rates across Switzerland suggests that both local (orographic) and regional effects limit moisture supply and availability in Alpine environments, especially in mountain valleys. The estimated number of convective events has increased across Switzerland in the last 30 years, with 30% of the stations showing statistically significant changes. The changes in intense convective storms with higher temperatures may be relevant for hydrological risk connected with those events in the future.

Description: This paper presents a method to identify intense warm season storms of convective character based on intensity thresholds and lightning, and analyzes their statistical properties. Long records of precipitation and lightning data at 4 stations and 10 min resolution in different climatological regions in Switzerland are used. Our premise is that thunderstorms associated with lightning generate bursts of high rainfall intensity. We divided all storms into those accompanied by lightning and those without lightning and found the threshold I* that separates intense events based on peak 10 min intensity Ip ≥ I* for a chosen misclassification rate α. The performance and robustness of the selection method was tested by investigating the inter-annual variability of I* and its relation to the frequency of lightning strikes. The probability distributions of the main storm properties (rainfall depth R, event duration D, average storm intensity Ia and peak 10 min intensity Ip) for the intense storm subsets show that the event average and peak intensities are significantly different between the stations, and highest in Lugano in southern Switzerland. Non-parametric correlations between the main storm properties were estimated for the subsets of intense storms and all storms including stratiform rain. The differences in the correlations between storm subsets are greater than those between stations, which indicates that care must be exercised not to mix events when they are sampled for multivariate analysis, e.g. copula fitting to rainfall data.

Description: Traditional frequency analysis of annual precipitation requires the fitting of a probability model to yearly precipitation totals. There are three potential problems with this approach: a long record (at least 25 ~ 30 years) is required in order to fit the model, years with missing data cannot be used, and the data need to be homogeneous. To overcome these limitations, we test an alternative methodology proposed by Eagleson (1978), based on the derived distribution approach (DDA). This allows for better estimation of the probability density function (pdf) of annual rainfall without requiring long records, provided that high-resolution precipitation data are available to derive external storm properties. The DDA combines marginal pdfs for storm depth and inter-arrival time to arrive at an analytical formulation of the distribution of annual precipitation under the assumption of independence between events. We tested the DDA at two temperate locations in different climates (Concepción, Chile, and Lugano, Switzerland), quantifying the effects of record length. Our results show that, as compared to the fitting of a normal or log-normal distribution, the DDA significantly reduces the uncertainty in annual precipitation estimates (especially interannual variability) when only short records are available. The DDA also reduces the bias in annual precipitation quantiles with high return periods. We also show that using precipitation data aggregated every 24 h, as commonly available at most weather stations, introduces a noticeable bias in the DDA. Our results point to the tangible benefits of installing high-resolution (hourly or less) precipitation gauges at previously ungauged locations. We show that the DDA, in combination with high resolution gauging, provides more accurate and less uncertain estimates of long-term precipitation statistics such as interannual variability and quantiles of annual precipitation with high return periods even for records as short as 5 years.

Description: The current work addresses one of the key building blocks towards an improved understanding of flood processes and associated changes in flood characteristics and regimes in Europe: the development of a comprehensive, extensive European flood database. The presented work results from ongoing cross-border research collaborations initiated with data collection and joint interpretation in mind. A detailed account of the current state, characteristics and spatial and temporal coverage of the European Flood Database, is presented. At this stage, the hydrological data collection is still growing and consists at this time of annual maximum and daily mean discharge series, from over 7000 hydrometric stations of various data series lengths. Moreover, the database currently comprises data from over 50 different data sources. The time series have been obtained from different national and regional data sources in a collaborative effort of a joint European flood research agreement based on the exchange of data, models and expertise, and from existing international data collections and open source websites. These ongoing efforts are contributing to advancing the understanding of regional flood processes beyond individual country boundaries and to a more coherent flood research in Europe.

Description: Flood disturbance is one of the major factors impacting riparian vegetation on river floodplains. In this study we use a high-resolution ground-based camera system with near-infrared sensitivity to quantify the immediate response of riparian vegetation in an Alpine, gravel bed, braided river to flood disturbance with the use of vegetation indices. Five large floods with return periods between 1.4 and 20.1 years in the period 2008–2011 in the Maggia River were analysed to evaluate patterns of vegetation response in three distinct floodplain units (main bar, secondary bar, transitional zone) and to compare the sensitivity of seven broadband vegetation indices. The results show both a negative (damage) and positive (enhancement) response of vegetation within 1 week following the floods, with a selective impact determined by pre-flood vegetation vigour, geomorphological setting and intensity of the flood forcing. The spatial distribution of vegetation damage provides a coherent picture of floodplain response in the three floodplain units. The vegetation indices tested in a riverine environment with highly variable surface wetness, high gravel reflectance, and extensive water–soil–vegetation contact zones differ in the direction of predicted change and its spatial distribution in the range 0.7–35.8%. We conclude that vegetation response to flood disturbance may be effectively monitored by terrestrial photography with near-infrared sensitivity, with potential for long-term assessment in river management and restoration projects.

Description: This paper presents a method to identify intense warm season storms with convective character based on intensity thresholds and the presence of lightning, and analyzes their statistical properties. Long records of precipitation and lightning data at 4 stations and 10 min resolution in different climatological regions in Switzerland are used. Our premise is that thunderstorms associated with lightning generate bursts of high rainfall intensity. We divided all recorded storms into those accompanied by lightning and those without lightning and found the threshold I* that separates intense events based on peak 10 min intensity Ip ≥ I* for a chosen misclassification rate α. The performance and robustness of the selection method was tested by investigating the inter-annual variability of I* and its relation to the frequency of lightning strikes. The probability distributions of the main storm properties (rainfall depth R, event duration D, average storm intensity Ia and peak 10 min intensity Ip) for the intense storm subsets show that the event average and peak intensities are significantly different between the stations. Non-parametric correlations between the main storm properties were estimated for intense storms and all storms including stratiform rain. The differences in the correlations between storm subsets are greater than those between stations, which indicates that care must be exercised not to mix events of different origin when they are sampled for multivariate analysis, for example, copula fitting to rainfall data.

Description: Sediment transport and erosion processes in channels are important components of water induced natural hazards in alpine environments. A distributed hydrological model, TOPKAPI, has been developed to support continuous simulations of river bed erosion and deposition processes. The hydrological model simulates all relevant components of the water cycle and non-linear reservoir methods are applied for water fluxes in the soil, on the surface and in the channel. The sediment transport simulations are performed on a sub-grid level, which allows for a better discretization of the channel geometry, whereas water fluxes are calculated on the grid level in order to be CPU efficient. Flow resistance due to macro roughness is considered in the simulation of sediment transport processes. Several transport equations as well as the effects of armour layers on the transport threshold discharge are considered. The advantage of this approach is the integrated simulation of the entire water balance combined with hillslope-channel coupled erosion and transport simulation. The comparison with the modelling tool SETRAC and with LiDAR based reconstructed sediment transport rates demonstrates the reliability of the modelling concept. The modelling method is very fast and of comparable accuracy to the more specialised sediment transport model SETRAC.